


The Alchemist

by bad_pheasants



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 17:29:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18428744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bad_pheasants/pseuds/bad_pheasants
Summary: Or: In order to catch the Doctor, River had to study the Doctor. River can’t look without being changed.





	The Alchemist

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RaineyDay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaineyDay/gifts).



**1**

She doesn’t understand, at first. Until she does. 

_To catch your prey, you must know your prey. To know your prey—_

It’s a funny thing, how a story ravels and unravels, the strands winding around it. _Skulking_ was a favored epithet of Madame Kovarian’s when she described the Doctor. River had to learn when he might show up, and where. 

To learn how to predict, Melody had to learn how to hunt. To learn how to hunt, Melody had to learn how to slip into her prey’s skin. 

She gets her first taste of it crossing the Atlantic after her first regeneration, from America to Britain; when freed, she would think later on, her first impulse was to return to the site of a bond. 

On that crossing, although her hands are deadly and her stature means she’s overlooked, discounted, the true discovery was the _spaces_ —between continents, between people, between perception and reality, between thought and action. From a closed environment, where every thought, every action, was caught and measured and shepherded, to this vast dark one, where so much went unseen. It was a marvel. 

It was a playground. In a game of steel and saltwater, moving waves and moving bodies, timelines and intentions crossing and recrossing against the backdrop of nations, wills, and that one thing—

_Bureaucracies_. 

**2**

How she got to the ship to Britain: Practical stealth, use of her wide uncertain eyes and a tremor in her voice. 

How she got _on_ the ship: She pretended to be someone’s child. They didn’t even realize that that was what she was doing. 

How she stayed safe on the ship for the whole length of the passage, with any number of people whose less savory natures eventually would make their existence known after long stretches in close quarters, was something that Madame Kovarian had already taught her. 

How she got into the country with no documents, no name, the only things in her head what Madame Kovarian put there—physically, she swam. 

But really, she opened her eyes, and saw with them for the first time the vast space opening up, between the ideas in her head and the world around her. How wide, scared eyes could conceal an intent that was anything but _childlike_. How a question in a high-pitched voice could set people at ease, allay suspicions; the immense freedom of deception. The arrow of her purpose, and, for the first time, the thread of her path. 

She dodged the maw of London, its bureaucratic machinery that would have caught her like a fish in a net. 

She comes to shore aware of something new: A body, a will; hers, her fellow travelers’. A universe folded into itself. And a greater body, and a greater will: a million small fish flocking towards London, disorganized but with the same ponderous force of the bureaucracy waiting there to meet it. 

And her, small, finite—she slips between their teeth. 

**3**

She learns again with Amy. How to slip through the cracks; how to tell lies when interested parents are involved; how to hide your secrets when you’re… known, in a way. 

She learns a lot—about being seen but going unnoticed. It comes more naturally to her. It feels, eventually, like _power_. To be beyond the reach of these forces, the ones that work on Amy, that wear her down as she faces them head-on. The ones that sought to shape Melody’s life. To lie, to deceive, and to succeed at that, is to slip between. To be unknown is to be free. 

More: It’s only in the gap beyond what is seen that Melody really exists. 

**4**

It’s their eyes: That look at a museum piece and see sentience, that look at a dead end and see a crack to slip through. 

He—Kovarian always called the Doctor “he”—is an alchemist, a word in a language not his own, but not wholly independent from him. He is an _alchemist_ , to look at one thing, one moment, and see the million fractal facets manifest within it, and pluck one from within, shifting the pieces so that that one, that facet, that moment—shines. A rope becomes a dare. An ancient, old-model TARDIS becomes a sentient creature, becomes a partner in crime—becomes a friend, even. With a clever mind, and a clever tongue, he invokes them. 

In another language, the word for the Doctor would be a _Time Lord_. 

Everything he touches breaks, Kovarian said. Everything he touches is blighted. Everything he touches _dies_. Destruction follows him; disorder and chaos and entropy. 

In her quest to understand her prey, Melody sees that it is not simply that. 

She can hold more than one thought in her head at a time; more than one framework. Any _human_ can do it, and they live in linear time. “What brings life to one gives death to another”—this is a linear denizen’s way of thinking. 

She can understand: Through Madame Kovarian’s “entropy”, the crack portending the doom of civilization and time itself, lies a riot of potential and fulfillment, twined around each other—all moments brought to _life_. 

They made her for this, after all: A Time Lord. The Silence needed her vision. The Silence needed _their_ vision. 

Everything they touch comes _alive_ , Melody thinks. Everything they touch _changes_. The idea slides between Kovarian’s vision and Melody’s world like a razor, leaving millimeters of vacuum in its wake. 

Enough. 

 

**5**

Melody knows… so much. She knows about the Doctor’s own future, things he doesn’t dare see. She knows the two morons standing next to the Doctor, right now, are only just beginning to understand who she is, even though she’s known them since Amy moved from Scotland. She knows how to use the gun she threatened menaced the Doctor with earlier. She knows that right now, she could fundamentally reshape this timeline in ways that it could never recover from. 

She knows that Madame Kovarian is wrong. 

But still, like a human, like a prisoner of _pattern_ and linearity—she carries out her mission. 

She kills the Doctor. 

And in order to set things right, for a few brief moments, she has to become _him_. To take the moment in her hands and _change_ it. 

Annoyingly, he calls her _another name_. And maybe it’s the poison, but—

But she knows how he sees. And with those words and that look in his eyes, he opens up something else, another possibility, if she’ll only listen. If she’ll only look. If she’ll only take the moment in her hands and _choose_. 

To be caught and to slip the bonds of Melody’s world; _Kovarian’s_ world again, _costs_. 

**++**

_“I lost my key.”_

It’s such a simple thing: How the Doctor _asks_. 

Kovarian might have called it manipulation; but it’s never just that, when what’s being offered is _more_ , is _beyond_. 

River has seen the Doctor do this, over and over again; on paper, in person. To speak to feral things that slip through the cracks. To make the world they live in thrive. 

And this new one, this new incarnation; she has all the silver tongue of the previous ones. And she has awe in her eyes when she looks at River. She’s so earnest when she speaks. 

Of course TARDISes and Time Lords simply… open for her. 

“You’re so gushy when you get desperate.” River teases. 

“You would be, too, if you’d spent days trapped on a poisonous rock with no hope of survival.” The Doctor strokes one of the crystalline panels. “And don’t talk bad about her. She’s beautiful.” New eyes look at her with the same knowing as ever. 

“Of course.” 

And of course, her Doctor needs a few moments to enjoy her reunion with one of her rescued strays. But inevitably, that restless mind turns to River. 

Gone are the fish-out-of-water remarks from earlier. Her Doctor backs her up against one of the panels while her new humans are sleeping. She looks at River like she’s memorizing her. 

Finally— “Would you believe,” Her Doctor says, “I lost my key?” 

River sighs. “Your pickup lines could use work, sweetie.” 

Ignoring the fact that they work on her just fine.


End file.
